In
The Prospect Of Being Able To Penetrate Into India, And Even Into China,
Newbery Was Furnished With Letters Of
Credence or recommendation, from
Queen Elizabeth to Zelabdim Echebar, stiled king of Cambaia, who
certainly appears to have been Akbar
Shah, emperor of the Mogul
conquerors of Hindostan, who reigned from 1556 to 1605; and to the
emperor of China. The promoters of this enterprise, seem to have been
actuated by a more than ordinary spirit of research for those times, by
employing a painter to accompany their commercial agents. It is farther
presumable that the promoters of the expedition, and their agents,
Newbery and Fitch, were members of the Turkey company; and though the
speculation turned out unsuccessful, owing to causes sufficiently
explained in the narrative and its accompanying documents, it is
obviously a prelude to the establishment of the English East India
Company; which, from small beginnings, has risen to a colossal height of
commercial and sovereign grandeur, altogether unexampled in all history.
[Footnote 402: Hakluyt, II. 382.]
Hakluyt gives the following descriptive title of this uncommonly curious
and interesting narrative: "The voyage of Mr Ralph Fitch, merchant of
London, by the way of Tripolis in Syria to Ormus, and so to Goa in the
East India, to Cambaia, and all the kingdom, of Zelabdim Echebar the
great Mogor, to the mighty river Ganges, and down to Bengala, to Bacola
and Chonderi, to Pegu, to Imahay in the kingdom of Siam, and back to
Pegu, and from thence to Malacca, Zeilan, Cochin, and all the coast of
the East India; begun in the year of our Lord 1583, and ended in 1591:
wherein the strange rites, manners, and customs of those people, and the
exceeding rich trade and commodities of those countries, are faithfully
set down and diligently described, by the foresaid Mr Ralph Fitch."
Hakluyt has prefaced this journal, by several letters respecting the
journey, from Mr Newbery, and one from Mr Fitch, and gives by way of
appendix an extract from Linschoten, detailing the imprisonment of the
adventurers at Ormus and Goa, and their escape, which happened while he
was at Goa, where he seems to have materially contributed to their
enlargement from prison.
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